[CentOS] Setting Group owner of files on USB drive

[Matt Hyclak]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 04:37:58PM -0400, Robert Moskowitz enlightened us:
> I just got a 8Gb flash drive and went to copy a bunch of files onto it.  
> I wanted to perserve everything, so I just took my archiving rsync 
> command and altered it to go to localhost:/media/RALLY2/ (name of flash 
> drive).  I am getting errors with changing the group owner.  Huh?
> 
> So I try to just use mkdir to create a directory on the flash drive.  
> The directory has a group of root ???
> 
> So I try a chgrp and get:
> 
> [root at mine me]# chgrp me /media/RALLY2/Stuff
> chgrp: changing group of `/media/RALLY2/Stuff': Operation not permitted
> 
> 
> OK why can't I set the group to something other than root?
> 
> ls -lstr /media/
> total 4
> 4 drwxr-xr-x 3 me root 4096 May 30 16:28 RALLY2
> 
> and of course for /media:
> 
> 8 drwxr-xr-x   3 root root  4096 May 30 16:18 media
> 

Most likely the device is formatted as FAT32, which has no concept of
permissions.

Reformat it, ignore the errors, or modify your rsync command to not preserve
uid/gid.

Matt

-- 
Matt Hyclak
Department of Mathematics 
Department of Social Work
Ohio University
(740) 593-1263